Time does not change us.
It just unfolds us.
By
not suppressing them, but writing them down, one acknowledges one's
thoughts, which belong at best only to the moment and the place that
produce them. One has no hope that two days hence, when one thinks the
opposite, one will be wiser. One is what one is. One uses one's pen like
the needle of a seismograph: we do not so much write as get a written.
[...]
And time?
It would according to this be
simply a magic device which separates out our nature and makes it
visible by laying out life, an omnipresence of all possibilities, as a
series. That alone is what makes it seem transitory, and that is why we
always tend to suppose that time, the one-thing-after-another, is not
actual, but apparent: it is an aid to visualization, a means of showing
us one after another things that are in fact interlocked, forming a
whole which we can no more grasp than we can see the separate colors
that constitute light, until its rays are broken down and dissected.
Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p12/13 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton
Link to original text in German
